Pain & Gain

Mark Wahlberg’s epic winning streak ends with the thankless lead role of a hotshot, morally slippery personal trainer who decides to take control of his life and his finances by kidnapping, torturing, and then seizing the assets of a rich, gaudy Jewish businessman (Tony Shalhoub). Often-unhelpful assistance arrives in the form of fellow gym freak Anthony Mackie and ex-con Dwayne Johnson, who clings to sobriety and faith as the cornerstones of a tough life. Due in no small part to the stupidity of the conspirators, the plot does not go according to plan. But that doesn't keep the overmatched crooks from plunging further and further into a world of criminality, from which they struggle to emerge with their lives or freedom intact.

Pain & Gain has one huge asset (literally) in the underrated Johnson, who lends his spiritual-struggler a sincere, poignant conviction (before he falls off the wagon) and a go-for-broke desperation (after he loses his spiritual center and embraces cocaine with the same intensity he once embraced Jesus’ purifying love). The squirmy humanity of Johnson’s performance stands in sharp contrast to the gratingly excessive visual style; Bay manages to recreate the overbearing and frenetic qualities of his usual fare, but at a fraction of the budget. Pain & Gain is less a satire of stupidity than a loud, brash, unapologetically vulgar celebration of aggression divorced from intellect. It’s the film Wahlberg and John C. Reilly’s characters in Boogie Nights would have written as a vehicle for themselves in a coked-up, narcissistic delirium, fatally unaware that the narrative makes them look like oblivious, dim-witted assholes, not the swaggering, Tony Montana-like badasses of their pop-culture–warped imaginations.